[OpenAFS-devel] Re: Adding utility to do a volume dump table of contents...

[Mitch Collinsworth]

> >I'm sorry to say we wrote tocvol last summer, though we called it list.
> >But here's the interesting part.  We recently started testing our code
> >on our production AFS servers and found that for large volume sets of
> >20-30 GB and lots of files, "list" can an inordinate amount of time.
> >For most of our volume sets it's not too bad, but in our worst case it
> >continues to run for a few hours after the actual dump has finished.
> >We've been looking at our code to try to find out why but haven't yet
> >found an obvious problem.  The programmer who did our coding is right
> >now looking at tocvol to see if he can find any obvious algorithmical
> >difference, in hopes that you may have solved our problem.  :-)
>
> I have noticed in dumptool (since you say "list" is based off of it) there
> are plenty of places for performance enhancements (I know it doesn't perform
> that well with larger volume dumps).  It's been on my "list" (ha ha) to
> look at, but you know how that goes ...

Certainly do..  The note I received from our programmer says that
Marc's code looks cleaner but that there are no obvious algorithmical
differences other than that tocvol prints its list as it goes, while
list waits and prints its list after if finishes traversing the dump.
He tested them both on a ~ 1 GB volume and they took roughly the same
time, ~ 58 seconds.

In order to avoid adding any further delay to our efforts to collaborate
on this, I've put our source tree where you can get it from either of
the following:

/afs/msc.cornell.edu/common/ftp/pub/amanda-afs
ftp://ftp.ccmr.cornell.edu/pub/amanda-afs

There's plenty yet to be done in documenting our work better, but for
now go ahead and look at it and ask me questions about anything that's
non-obvious.

-Mitch